How people in other nations spend their weekends, translated…
At the mention of the French people, we’d often heard of how they enjoy luxuries, how they are not hard working enough, how they lacked the ability to perform well at work………summing it up in just one word: LAZY!
The Asian communities greatly values the beliefs of working hard, so, we’d felt, that if you’re not spending ALL of your time on work, more precisely, on making money, then, you’d get labeled as lazy. Actually, in recent years, there are some changes in the western society that used to focus on materialistic enjoyments. People felt tiresome of the industrializations of spending money, and, a lot of them are turning back around, to find the true meanings of their lives now, changing the way they’d spent money, slowing down their paces in life, hoping, to find that traditional value that’s already lost back again. It is so, for France.
Actually, France has a five week vacation time out of the entire working year, the work hours are thirty-five per week, and there were often, strikes by the workers, and still, France ranked within the top ten of productivity across the world. Other than humanities, arts, philosophies, the railway system is the top of the world, and the medical, the aerodynamics, the nuclear power are also, very highly rated, and, there are many Nobel Prize winners that were from France too, and, all of the successes goes to the core values of France.
In their values, they do not treat work like it’s everything in their lives. They don’t have any overtime, because for the enterprises, overtime is too costly, and there’s no “if you get off work early than everybody else, you’re NOT working hard enough”. In their beliefs, the time spent at work is not positively correlated with the attitude someone takes to work, or the productivity either.
What, are the French Doing on the Weekends?
A lot of people ask me, what are the French doing on the weekends? Although their workhours are truly shorter than ours, but, if you think that they’re all squatting in front of the television, drinking beers, watching football, then, you’re wrong.
Most French families have jam-packed schedules on the weekends. Because they work from Monday through Friday, and, so a lot of the nitty-gritty things in life are saved for the weekends. A lot of the banks are operating on Saturdays and off on Mondays, the post offices, the local government offices are all open on Saturdays too, to make it more convenient for the working class. And so, everybody plans out their Saturdays, for instance, go to the local government offices to get the documents they needed, pick up or send the packages via mail, to the banks, to take care of various things, etc., etc., etc.
And, for the afternoons on Saturdays, usually saved for shopping, groceries, taking kids to outside talents, music lessons, art classes, sports. The younger children would hold their birthday parties in the afternoons. The children in France are used to celebrating their birthdays at home, and would invite a dozen of their friends, and the parents must prepare the cakes beforehand (all baked by the mothers mostly), candies, drinks, and, the activities planning, and, the mothers must act as referees, hostesses, ushers, nannies, etc., etc., etc. After the party is over, the kids still needed to take home the party favors, the candies, the bags of gifts, books, etc., etc., etc., and, an afternoon is gone, and this, still doesn’t include the preparation time beforehand.
On Saturday evenings, time for the adults to mingle. Based off of my experiences of living in France for over thirty years, for the business meetings, the French would arrange for luncheons, and the evenings, are saved for friends to gather, and these are mostly held at home. Because of the busyness of work on the weekdays, the working women would always entertain the guests on weekends, on the one hand, it gives the hostess ample time to prepare, on the other, there’s no work the day after, and everybody can just relax and have fun.
In Taiwan, on the weekends, the restaurants are JAMMED up, if you didn’t make a reservation, then, you can’t get a seat; and for France, it’s exactly the opposite, a lot of the restaurants are off on the weekends, because there’s NO business luncheons on weekends, and, most people don’t leave town, staying at home with the family.
And that, would be the cultural differences between the west and the east, for a lot of the working class here, on weekends, they go out to eat, because they’d worked hard all week long, and they think that they deserve a break from the ordinary.
Life, the Obstacle Course 